Miroljub Todorović

Third millenium spirituality

(Exhibition of rubber stamp imprints by Andrej Tišma at the „Happy Gallery“, Students Cultural Center in Belgrade).

The multimedia artist Andrej Tišma (1952) is certainly the most internationally recognized performer after Marina Abramovic. He graduated from the Fine Arts Academy in Prague in 1976 and continued his artistic activities in Novi Sad, where he currently lives. So far he has had several dozen solo exhibitions and has participated in more than five hundred group exhibitions in forty countries all over the world.

Tišma's creative portrait would not be complete if we did not mention that he is also doing concrete poetry, photography, electrographics and video art. As an „interpreter“ of art and an essayist (he is a full-time visual arts reviewer at the Novi Sad daily newspaper „Dnevnik“), he has presented a well-rounded picture of his views in a book titled „Other territories“ (1992). His three monographs were well received abroad : „Private life“ (1986), „Nature gives“ (1992) and „Fax HeART“ (1995).

That boundaries between various forms of art and languages are not insurmountable is nicely demonstrated by this multifarious

artist through the fact that he has published eleven books of prose and poetry, under the pseudonym Andrej Živor, several  of which have been translated to English and Portuguese.

At the „Happy Gallery“ of the SCC in Belgrade, Tišma has presented his work through a collection of rubber stamp imprints, an art

form which is a sub-group of a very complex and diversified movement  - mail-art, which has dominated the international alternative art scene in the last three decades. At the outset, it can easily be said of Tišma's stamps that they are a kind of sublimation. In other words, they reflect the entire scope of the artist's work as a performer and networker. He has transferred his most important performances and mail-art actions to the stamps, thus continuing to use their agonic energy from one medium to another.

The retrospect at the „Happy Gallery“, besides the cycle of purely artistic and esthetic messages such as „(Spi)rituals“, „Erotics“ and

„Encounter art“, features such cycles as „Textual messages“ and particularly curious „Embargo art“ in which socially and ethically relevant themes prevail. At the time, Tišma was very actively engaged in the campaign against the sanctions imposed on Yugoslavia. He had created a number of stamps (messages) and vehemently debated the issue with some American artists who had no sensibility for his activities of this type.

On one occasion, when he was explaining his „(Spi)rituals“, the artist claimed that they are an attempt at transmitting spirituality to various artistically uninteresting objects and materials. „I perform actions in natural surroundings, radiating my positive spirituality to the environment“, Tišma concluded.

By constantly doing intensive research work in various techniques and methods in a number of art forms, „humanizing technology“ and insisting on the „awakening of spirituality“, Andrej Tišma has once again introduced himself as a planetary artist, who has already entered the third millennium with his innovative and inspiring work.

1997.

Translated by: Gordana Perc